The dark clouds burned off by noon, the sun appeared and the Lakers hunkered down in their ElSegundo practice facility to take a look at their better half Friday.

There was no sense revisiting their historic collapse during the second half of Game 4 of the NBAFinals on Thursday night. Living through it once was rough enough.

With that in mind, the Lakers’ coaching staff went to work on restoring the team’s damaged confidence during a video session. Coach Phil Jackson called off his scheduled practice and sat the players down to show them what worked so well for them enroute to a 24-point lead midway through the second quarter.

Jackson did not want them dwelling on what went wrong during a horrendous second half that led to a 97-91 loss to the Boston Celtics, a defeat that left them on the brink of elimination. Boston leads the best-of-7 series three games to one, with Game 5 on Sunday.

“I told them the series is not over,” Jackson said, echoing a comment he made to his players immediately after the Lakers’ loss.

For the record, eight teams in league history have rallied from a 3-1 deficit to win a playoff series, but none have done it during the Finals.

“I think everybody who has a part of this, from Rudy Garciduenas, who’s our equipment manager, probably thought he put the wrong Tide in the uniforms,” Jackson continued.

“Everybody that feels like they did something they could have done to help the team and weren’t able to help the team has to consider that. That’s what you mull as a coach over in your mind at 1 or 5 in the morning after a situation like that, what could have we done differently?

“But the other aspect is that you’ve got to give credit when credit is due.”

Indeed, the Celtics played a huge role in the Lakers’ demise. Paul Pierce’s defense against Kobe Bryant was especially crucial in sparking Boston to the biggest comeback in the Finals since the league began keeping track of such things in 1971.

“We just wet the bed,” Bryant said. “A nice big one, too. One of the ones you can’t put a towel over. It was terrible.”

Bryant scored only 17 points on 6-for-19 shooting, his lowest output of the playoffs so far. He had 22 points during a blowout victory in Game 3 against the Denver Nuggets in the first round and matched that total during a rout of the San Antonio Spurs in Game 2 of the Western Conference finals.

Bryant joked – at least it seemed like he was joking – that the only cure for a loss like the Lakers’ defeat in Game 4 was to get stinking drunk. Jackson insisted he did not call off practice because his players nursed hangovers.

“No, I think that they looked clear-eyed for the most part,” Jackson said. “They looked relatively clear-eyed. We watched some tape; we looked at the first half.

“Obviously, we were successful in the first half and did some things that got a lead for us, and I wanted to explain to them that they were the same ballclub, the same personnel that went out there in the second half, and if they can get that kind of a lead, they can maintain that kind of a game if they really put their minds to it.”

In fact, the Lakers passed the ball with an efficiency that recalled early-round victories over the Nuggets, Utah Jazz and Spurs. The Lakers led 35-14 at the end of the first quarter, 58-40 at halftime and still held a 70-50 edge deep in the third quarter.

The Lakers then came unglued.

“Well, there’s some little things that jump out,” Jackson said. “Pau (Gasol) had a situation where he had a dunk and it came out or it was blocked or there was a foul … He didn’t go perhaps hard enough to the basket in one of those situations.

“But that turned out to be a critical play. That’s right where we could have gone from 12 to 14 (points ahead of the Celtics) and instead we go from 12 to 10, or 14 to 16, and it went back to 14 to 12.”

Like any good team, the Celtics capitalized on the Lakers’ many shortcomings, outscoring them 57-33 in the second half. Now the Celtics can eliminate them and claim the 17thNBA title in franchise history with a victory Sunday.

Elliott Teaford covers the Clippers and the NBA for the Southern California News Group. He has written about hockey for the past five years and is looking forward to thawing out after so many days and nights sitting in frozen rinks. He also covered the Lakers for five seasons, including their back-to-back NBA championships in 2009 and '10. He once made a jump shot over future Utah Jazz center Mark Eaton during a pickup game in 1980 at Cypress College.

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